As is known in the art, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can communicate with a control station via a signal path often referred to as a datalink. The UAV can include a patch antenna to receive data over the datalink. A patch antenna is a type of antenna having at least one antenna element disposed over a ground plane. The at least one antenna element of the patch antenna may be coupled to a feed circuit (e.g. either directly coupled or capacitively or inductively) using various known balun structures or other known coupling devices.
As is also known, conventional patch antennas which are conformal to a UAV fuselage typically have very narrow bandwidth and/or have low gain characteristics. To solve this problem, one may increase the thickness of the patch antennas. By increasing the thickness of a patch antenna, the patch antenna is provided having bandwidth and/or gain characteristics which are increased relative to patch antennas which are not as thick. Increasing the thickness of a patch antenna however, increases the antenna's size and weight and, thus affects the amount of area and/or volume required on the UAV to house the antenna.
Furthermore, in cases where such a relatively thick patch antenna extends past an outer surface of a fuselage (i.e. so that the patch antenna is no longer conformal to an outer surface of the fuselage of the UAV) or the patch antenna is simply mounted on an outer surface of the UAV (again, such that the patch antenna is not conformal to the outer surface of the UAV fuselage), then a relatively thick patch antenna may also negatively impact the UAV's flight performance.
There is, therefore, a need for a UAV having a conformal patch antenna having relatively wide bandwidth and relatively high gain characteristics and that operates in an ultrahigh frequency (UHF) or very high frequency (VHF) band while maintaining a relatively small physical size.